


And When You're Gone, We Want You All To Know

by UniverseOnHerShoulders



Series: Series 12 Vignettes [5]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Gen, Post-Episode: s12e10 The Timeless Children
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-10
Updated: 2020-03-24
Packaged: 2021-03-01 00:08:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23065984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UniverseOnHerShoulders/pseuds/UniverseOnHerShoulders
Summary: "Sometimes I get the feelingShe's watching over meAnd other times I feel like I should goAnd through it all, the rise and fallThe bodies in the streetsAnd when you're gone, we want you all to know..."After Gallifrey, after the Cyber-Masters, after the Death Particle... life still goes on. Even when we don't want it to.
Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor & Yasmin Khan
Series: Series 12 Vignettes [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1731406
Comments: 18
Kudos: 69





	1. Part One

**Author's Note:**

> General warnings for mentions of depression and suicide.
> 
> Some angst for you all, because the finale broke my heart.

The road is, as ever, deserted. The wide swathes of grass on either side have been baked hard by the spring sunlight, and her favourite spot, once a patch of bare earth, has grown over with turf since her first trek up here; so much so that on her first visit back, it had taken her a while to find it and arrange herself comfortably, her legs crossed as they had been that day.

Yaz comes up here to think sometimes. She knows it would scare Sonya to know where her sister is spending so much of her time, so she tries to avoid telling her about where she goes, instead spouting endless lies about job hunting or meeting friends or going shopping. She knows her sister doesn’t quite believe her, but she isn’t quite worried enough to be suspicious of every word she says yet, and so she can pass her days in relative tranquillity, freed as she is from the mundanity of a job or regular shifts or having to commit to staying in shape. She hasn’t had the heart to go back to the police, not after everything that’s happened, and so she spends her days now up here, trawling through jobsites on her phone or applying to minimum-wage jobs, wondering whether she’s made an enormous mistake.

She thinks about things – her family, her career, her past travels with her friends – as she sits at the side of the road, her head propped on her knees and her gaze fixed over Sheffield. Sprawled out beneath her, especially in the dark, she can almost pretend it’s of the same degree of magnificence as the universe; can almost pretend that the light streaming from people’s uncurtained windows is the same intensity and quality as the stars she had once gazed out over from the safety of the TARDIS, or the relative danger of other spaceships or satellites or alien planets. She tries to lie to herself that it’s a worthy substitute, but the city’s not quite the same; there’s none of the excitement imbued in the view, none of the purple-hued light wreathed around galaxies in the middle distance, none of the sense of wonder that had taken her breath away. There’s nothing but the darkness and the artificiality of the ugly yellow light, cut through by an occasional police siren, and she flinches at the sound each time she hears it. It’s a stark reminder of all that she’s given up, and it cuts her like a knife to hear something that had once been so mundane to her that she’d hardly noticed it.

She remembers, each time she hears it, the arguments that had come to pass after her decision; her parents pleading with her to reconsider; Sonya crying silently in the doorway of the kitchen as she understands precisely what Yaz’s decision means, and what it could inexorably lead to. She doesn’t want to worry her sister further by explaining herself or all that has come to pass, and so Yaz mainly avoids her now; speaking to her the bare minimum she possibly can, trying to put on a brave face and a smile as she slinks around the flat, surrounded by the lies she’s so carefully wrapped around herself and the persona she has created. No, she’s fine; no, she doesn’t regret leaving the police; no, it’s not anyone’s business but hers; no, there was no specific reason for her decision.

There is, though.

A reason that she can see every time she closes her eyes, etched into her memory in agonising, painstaking detail.

“Live good lives,” the Doctor had said, and then she’d stepped out of the TARDIS and back onto Gallifrey with a hand grenade and a Death Particle in her hands, not once faltering or looking back.

“Live good lives,” the Doctor had said, as she’d made the choice to make the ultimate sacrifice for the sake of their safety. And seconds earlier, the statement that plays, over and over again, in Yaz’s mind as she lays awake at night: “I would do that in a heartbeat for this universe. For you, my fam.”

“Live good lives,” the Doctor had said as her parting shot, and then turned away from them, and Yaz had let her go; she’d _let her go_ ; she’d let her leave without so much as a thank you or an embrace or anything of any more substantiality than the horrified, disbelieving expression that had been etched on her face. She’d let her best friend walk away from her, unable to find the words to express what she wanted so desperately to say, and she would live with that regret until her dying day. The woman who had changed her world had left them behind with the intention of saving the universe, yes, but Yaz knew that one of the prime motivators in her decision had been saving the three of them. She supposed she’d always known the Doctor was capable of such grand, dramatic actions; always sensed a ferocity and protectiveness in the Time Lady that had scared her in its intensity, unused as she was to being loved so fiercely and with such all-encompassing care for her safety, but hearing it spoken aloud had frightened her. To be faced with the empirical evidence of such absolute devotion was frighteningly intoxicating, yes, but now it was only heart-breaking; to know that she had been so loved that the Doctor had died for her to live renders her so guilty that she often wonders what it would be like to simply do the same and slip away, only without the solace that comes from knowing that her sacrifice was not in vain. The only one who would find solace in her passing would be herself; freed as she would be from the trappings of guilt that comes with knowing that the Doctor died for her.

Not just her, but Ryan and Graham too – friends whom Yaz had so pointedly avoided spending time with since they’d stepped out of the strange TARDIS and onto the newly-minted tarmac of a housing estate near Leeds; pointedly avoided spending time with since they’d spent an awkward coach journey in terse silence and she’d snapped at Ryan for daring to express his optimism about the Doctor’s fate. He’d been childlike enough in his outlook to think that the Doctor was about to pop up; misguided enough to think that the entire thing had been a carefully crafted ruse, and that any second now, the Doctor was going to appear in the seat beside them, beaming from ear to ear.

Yaz had been, in retrospect, a little harder on him than she should have been. Had told him, in no uncertain terms, that the Doctor was dead and it was their fault; had told him that everything they had had was gone now, destroyed alongside the Time Lady and the Master and Gallifrey. Had chastised him for his blind, desperate optimism; had told him what a fool he was to think the Doctor could have survived the Death Particle.

Graham had, of course, taken Ryan’s side. Had dared to express his naïve, foolish view that there was still a chance the Doctor would come back to them. Ko Sharmus had, after all, left the TARDIS with the intention of preventing the downfall of the woman on whom the universe had come to depend; had gone in search of her in the hope of saving her life. But the Doctor hadn’t reappeared; hadn’t stumbled over the threshold with her mouth set in its most steely of lines; hadn’t stood at the console with her fists clenched as they’d dematerialised – they’d had to do that alone, watching the central column rise and fall and collectively holding their breaths until they’d landed back on Earth with no sign of their friend.

No, the Doctor is gone, and the fact that Ryan and Graham can’t understand that or the magnitude of what Yaz has lost is jarring. She’d told them so; shouted it for the world to hear on public transport; and they’d looked at her with hurt as she’d stormed off the coach at Sheffield, her arms wrapped around herself protectively and her head bowed to disguise the tears that were trickling down her cheeks. The rain had been welcome; a pathetic fallacy that had matched her mood, and she had been able to blame her general air of downtroddenness on the weather, rather than carrying the weight of culpability on her shoulders.

She’d been smiling when she’d stepped through the front door of the flat, though. Smiling, smiling, smiling, because rule one, all that time ago, had been to never let them see how broken she really was. Sonya could see through it, of course, as she always had, and Yaz had retreated to her usual repertoire of avoidance techniques over the past few months; lies and half-truths, leaving the house at the approximately correct times, murmuring about the unspecified loss of a friend, and then when all else failed, simply refusing to say anything more. Her family seemed to have let it lie, however uneasily, but she knew that her parents stayed up at night whispering about her; she’d heard them, as she stood on silent feet outside their room while they’d exchanged murmured words about _Yasmin_ and _loss_ and _counselling_.

She’d invented a counsellor, just to please them – well, not _invented_ , but plucked a name off the internet and duly traipsed over to the general vicinity of their office each week. Her parents had seemed pleased by the development, even given her the money for the sessions, but once Sonya had trailed her there and back without her knowledge, the game was up. The culmination of the argument that followed had been the admission of her decision to leave the police, and the throwing in their face – both literal and symbolic – of the crisp, newly-minted banknotes they had been presenting her with twice a week with the desperate, Sisyphean intention of improving her mental health.

They didn’t understand. How could they, when they’d never seen how far she had fallen, all those years before? They’d never seen the hours she’d spent alone in her room, reading the abuse on her phone as it flooded in, wanting nothing more than to throw the device across the room and yet finding herself unable to tear herself away from the screen. They’d never sat in the canteen at school with their every sense attuned to the people around them, waiting for the first comment or thrown item of food to land, preparing to run. They’d never sat in class and felt the uncomfortable prickle of anxiety about getting changed for PE, or the agonising, frightening prospect of wearing her PE kit in front of her peers. They hadn’t been there on that day when the police car had brought her home and deposited her on the doorstep, and while she couldn’t blame them for their obliviousness, concerned as they had been with their jobs and their own lives and keeping up appearances, there remained a lingering sentiment of bitterness that they’d failed to notice that she wasn’t coping. She’d needed them, and they hadn’t understood why or how; hadn’t seen beyond the bad grades and the change in attitude which they had lambasted with such frequency. Hadn’t seen anything more than a typical teenage tantrum, and she’d be damned if she’d break their hearts by telling them the truth. Let them read her depression and weariness as stubbornness or laziness; let them write her off as being dramatic or attention-seeking. At least it would spare them some of the pain.

They hadn’t seen beyond her perceived stubbornness this time, either. Couldn’t – or wouldn’t – understand why she would throw away the career she had strived for, trained for, studied for. She’d endeavoured to be the best for so long, and her sergeant had looked at her, aghast, as she’d handed in her resignation, wondering aloud why she would consider such a thing.

How could she tell him that she feels that she could never be a good police officer when she’d allowed her best friend to die in her stead?

How could she tell him about the guilt that weighs down her every step, threatening to drag her below the waves of depression that lap at the edges of her consciousness and cloud her every judgement?

How could she tell him that she doesn’t know how she could save the life of a stranger when she’d been unable to save the life of the best person she’d ever met?

That the Doctor merits that title brooks no arguments in Yaz’s mind. She knows that the Doctor is the best person she could ever even have hoped to meet, unconventional as that first encounter was; she recalls the strange woman who had crashed through the roof of a train and immediately started calling her Yaz because – and she smiles at the memory, although the action is accompanied by tears – they were friends now. The person who had quite literally fallen into Yaz’s life from outer space, grabbed her by the hand, and forced her out of the slump she’d found herself in; showed her not only the world but the universe, and helped her to face her fears. The person who she’d admired, annoyed, cursed, adored and aspired to be, all in equal measure.

And now she’s gone.

She’s gone, and Yaz doesn’t know how to face the guilt that boils inside her, as thick and viscous as tar, threatening to consume her as she sits by the side of the road where it had almost ended, all those years before.

She should have offered herself in the Doctor’s place. The Master might have frightened her beyond what she could fathom, but the thought of becoming a Cyberman frightened her more, and dying in the Doctor’s stead would have been a worthy end for a terrified girl from Sheffield who is tired of fighting and faking her way through the days, she reasons. The Doctor would have been free to keep saving the universe, and she would be… well, atomised, free from the burden of sadness or worry, and mingling with the stars of the cosmos.

She hopes, when she tilts her head back in the depths of the night and looks up at the stars above her – stars she can name now, thanks to the Doctor’s repeated endeavours – that the Time Lady is up there somewhere, weaving in and out of the space between spaces, part of the eternal universe. She holds out her hand sometimes, imagining she can still touch the stars as she once did; imagining her fingers lacing through the lingering remains of the Doctor’s, and she regrets now that she never thought to do this while her friend was alive. Curses herself for not thinking, even in those final moments, to offer the Time Lady an embrace, or any words of comfort. Loathes herself for her own foolish callousness; wishes a thousand times over that things could be different.

But as she lays on the cold, compacted earth on a grass verge above Sheffield, she knows. Knows it can never be, and will never be. She made her choices.

And now, her punishment is this.

Mundane eternity, and the prison of her own guilt.


	2. Part Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In a cell in a Judoon prison, the Doctor reflects on all that has come to pass.

The Doctor screams.

The Doctor makes vague, unspecified threats about the Shadow Proclamation.

The Doctor makes far, far more detailed threats about the Shadow Proclamation, and her legal team.

The Doctor beats her fists on the walls until they’re bloody, and still nobody comes. She looks down at the crimson smeared over the stonework and wonders, idly, whether the pain in her knuckles might be enough to regenerate, or whether such a hope is foolish. She wonders, for one idle moment, about smashing her head into the rock and simply having done with it; her previous experiences of regeneration – well, the ones she could recall, at least; the ones the Time Lords haven’t stolen from her – had burnt up enough energy to destroy the TARDIS, so there seems little hope for this maximum security cell if she decides to burn away the remains of the woman she is now, but the thought of losing who she is for the… well, for an unquantifiable number of times is anathema to her, and so she simply sinks to her haunches in the middle of the cell, whimpering as she holds her hands to her chest and waits for them to heal.

It takes a long time. Longer than she’d like; longer than the miraculous healing she had been able to recall, briefly, in her dreams of Ireland. Another life; another regeneration cycle; another place. Perhaps she had been blessed, back then, with some unknown piece of technology, or her abilities had simply been more potent before she’d grown older, weaker, and slower. She wonders, not for the first time, how the young Irish Garda fit into her lives, and flinches as she remembers how he’d – she’d? – screamed as they’d pillaged his memories, removing all traces of joy and happiness and identity until he’d – she’d? – become nothing more than a shell. The pain of the Chameleon Arch is seared into her memories from her time on Earth in the early twentieth century, and the agony of the young Irishman makes her flinch as she half-imagines, half-relives his suffering.

How many lifetimes had been taken from her in the same way? She counts the ones she recalls on her fingers, flexing the digits experimentally and feeling the scrape and pull of damaged bones and protesting tendons as she does so. Her hands are mending, slowly, but the pain still radiates up her arms, pooling in her chest and combining with her hatred and self-loathing and confusion until she wants to simply close her eyes and cease to be.

She’d wanted that on Gallifrey. Alone and frightened, she’d wanted to simply cease being; wanted to wink out of existence in a heroic flash, taking some of her most loathed foes with her. Well. Her most-loathed foes and _him_ , her best enemy, her first friend, and the architect of her current suffering. He’d known how much it would hurt her to know that things had been taken from her; to know that there were millennia missing from her recollection; to know that everything she had thought to be true was a lie. How old is she really? As old as the Time Lords and their civilisation, certainly, but older than that, and then some.

She wonders about all the people she had been, in the beginning; wonders about her first childhood, both in her home universe and on Gallifrey, and wonders how it must have felt to have been the child of a mother whose only interest in her had been as a scientific experiment; a code to crack; a riddle to unpick. She supposes she must have been loved at one time, before she had fallen and it had all changed; before she had revealed her true nature and become something which was desirable and attainable; something the Shobogans could use to rise up and elevate themselves in the hierarchy of the universe.

She’s glad, she supposes. Glad she doesn’t recall the details of those early years; the first experiments; the inescapable pain that must have come with them. She wonders how many regenerations her adoptive mother must have caused her inadvertently; wonders how many times – or even _if_ – she’d apologised, or felt remorse over what she was doing. She wonders how many times she had pleaded with Tecteun to stop; to stop the pain and the experiments and the exploration of her DNA, before finally the code had been unlocked and her so-called mother – what a misnomer! – had regenerated herself; been elevated and called a king amongst men.

She remembers the fire that had burned in her as she’d stood before the Master on Gallifrey, craving the one thing she could – apparently – never have. She’d never much considered her own mortality before, save for her period of self-imposed exile on Trenzalore, but now, to know that she would not have died without the intervention of her people… it overwhelms her. She would never face death. There would never be an end point to all of this; there would never be that final, natural end to the cycle of life and death and regeneration. There is simply eternity, and her, and the death of all those she loves.

She remembers her predecessor, standing in the TARDIS and begging to be allowed to die. Begging to be allowed to let go; wanting nothing more than to be allowed that final release and the blessed peace that would come with ceasing to be. The knowledge now that he would never have been granted that desire makes her want to smash her still-wounded hands into the walls once more; as her thoughts branch off, the realisation that her wife, compassionate to the last, had sacrificed her regenerations and her immortality for nothing breaks her, and drives her to hit the rock again with sheer, brute force. Her hands smash into the stonework with satisfying _thuds_ , and she screams again as the skin splits and blood splatters across her skin, luridly crimson even in the gloom. A single droplet blooms across the sleeve of her coat, but she can’t bring herself to care; she watches it spread across the fabric in an abstract pattern, marking the fabric forever, as she loses herself in her thoughts.

River could be with her now. River could be alive; River could be vividly, gloriously alive in effervescent technicolour, but instead she sacrificed her regenerations for the sake of a Time Lord who could, unknowingly, never die; a Time Lord for whom such a sacrifice was futile and unnecessary; a Time Lord who was and is underserving of such a selfless act. She pounds her fists into the rock at the sheer unfairness of it all, screaming as she does so; loathing herself as she pictures their faces in a constant, unceasing parade – not just River, but all of those who have laid down their lives for her; needlessly; fruitlessly; and the guilt of their deaths is crushing in its intensity. She falls to the floor at last, her energy spent, and weeps for what feels like days, the air in her lungs being expelled only in agonised cries as she apologises, over and over, for each and every death; each and every one of which she forces herself to relive in unflinching, terrible detail.

It’s a long, long list.

As she makes her penance, attempting to find atonement while shivering and kneeling on the floor of her cell, her hands heal in ugly, tight scars, purple and red splashed across her knuckles like paint. She could cheat; could use the regeneration energy that wells around them to smooth over the wounds, but the sight of the golden glow only makes her feel uncomfortably, painfully sick. She wills it away and allows herself to heal the human way, slowly and uncomfortably, while she recites the names of each and every one of the deceased and murmurs a silent apology in the language of their people. Old words, half-forgotten words, but always they are there; even when she barely has another world of Kroll or High Septian or Cambellan, she knows those words.

_I’m sorry._

The desire to die is still with her, buried deep in her chest, somewhere between her two hearts. She doesn’t understand who she is, and she wants to, but alongside that urge is the urge to simply wink out of existence. Forever off-limits to her, her own death has become a topic of fascination since her confinement in this cell and she ponders what it would take to do it; to achieve the unthinkable. The Death Particle would have worked, she supposes, or something similarly annihilating; she wonders what horrors remain in the vaults of Gallifrey, and whether she can bring herself to go back there and seek them out. Perhaps the Moment might still be there, tucked away after her aborted attempt to use it all those centuries before, but the thought of whose form it might take now frightens her so intensely that her mind flinches away from the very idea, and she balls her hands into fists at her sides and tries to bite back the urge to entertain the notion any further. She wonders instead how Gallifrey looks now, devoid of the corpses of her people and devoid of any flora and fauna that might have survived the Master’s assault; empty of life, a mere shell of the place she had once so loved. She snorts at that thought; _loved_ , yes, because she hadn’t known any better; hadn’t known the depths of the depravity of her own people and what they were capable of. All of them selfish; all of them heartless. All except, perhaps, one.

She tries not to think about _him_ , or at least not any more than is necessary. The maniacal look on his face as he had pleaded with her to kill them both had frightened her more than anything else; had made her wonder how deeply his loathing for her had been ingrained to despise the knowledge that all he was had been thanks to her with such intensity that it driven him first to genocide, and then suicide. That his own ego had compelled him to do such a thing had robbed her of breath, even as they’d stood in the Panopticon; each time she’d thought she understood him, he ripped the floor out from underneath her, and his begging for death had done that again. She’d thought she’d mattered to him; thought the decades spent together in the Vault had meant something; and yet his hatred and contempt of her had reduced him to… well, to nothing, both figuratively and literally. The atoms of him might be floating through the air she’s breathing, and the thought of this is so alarming that she ceases aerobically respirating for a week, before clarifying with the sonic that the oxygen in the prison cell is quadruple-filtered, and allowing herself to let out a long breath, relieved that he cannot, at least, become a part of her. The thought is so ironic that she bites back a manic yelp of laughter.

Had she really meant to little to him? Or was it simply that his desire to be someone of his own had filled him with such fury and such passion? How could it have driven him to mass-murder on such an industrial scale; how could it have driven him so insane that he had killed the children of Gallifrey in the name of the frightened child she had once been? The thought of children dying at his hands makes her nauseous; the murder of so many innocents, unknowing of who they even were and without any of the arrogance or coldness that came from years at the Academy, being groomed into Time Lords through discipline and indoctrination. Her people had never cared much for children or the sanctity of childhood; she and the Master could attest to that.

Could that have been it? Could it have been the thought of another child suffering as he had; the thought of the same trials and horrors being performed on her that had been performed on him, and the entire thing had been some kind of awful, noble retribution intended to win her favour? But there is no favour; there is only the pain of knowing that she is once again the last of her kind, and that the Master is, at least to her knowledge, little more than atoms.

If that.

She tries not to think of him.

She tries to think about the team, and what they’re doing. Not worrying about her; that much she’s certain of. They’ll be back on Earth, if her programming of the strange, unknown TARDIS has held up, and she smiles to herself when she thinks of Yaz being promoted up the ranks of the police force; Ryan studying hard for his qualifications; and Graham enjoying a leisurely retirement somewhere sunny. She wonders whether, if she manages to escape from this, they’ll welcome her return to their lives, and weighs up her options.

Will Yaz want that? Will Ryan? Will Graham? An exhausted, terrified, confused Time Lord, traumatised and scarred, turning up on their doorsteps and demanding they set off on a quest for the truth about who she is? Of course they won’t, she reasons; of course they’ll want to get on with the lives they’ll be forging for themselves. She won’t have a place in their futures, and that’s… alright. Or so she tries to tell herself.

She tries to smile, when she thinks of them.

Tries, but more often than not finds herself in silent tears, her hearts aching for the friends she’s lost.


	3. Part Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Doctor escapes captivity, but freedom brings its own trials and tribulations, as well as its own questions.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope everyone is keeping safe! Sending love to you all.

The Doctor doesn’t know where she’s going. River had slapped the haphazardly-programmed Vortex Manipulator onto her wrist with a smile and a wink, and the Doctor had only had time to close her eyes and let her mind flick briefly, treacherously, to thoughts of Earth before it had fizzed into life, zapping her out of her cell and into the unknown.

There’s the usual nausea and discomfort that comes with cheap and nasty time travel, and then…

She’s spat out somewhere dark, onto something surprisingly and mercifully soft, and when everything stops spinning, she realises she’s been deposited in a heap onto the floor of a room on what seems and smells like Earth. She places her hands down and gingerly runs them over what’s beneath her, finding soft fabric and beneath that, well-worn carpet, and she turns her head around blindly, seeking any source of light but finding only the soft glow of an alarm clock, broadcasting to her that it’s the dead of night. Still, it’s a nice change, she thinks appreciatively, and could’ve been worse – with her luck, she’s lucky not to have ended up somewhere more deeply unpleasant than a strange room in the small hours. It’s dark, wherever she is; and cold, and she’s still blinking hard in a bid to get her bearings when her hand knocks over a half-empty mug of cold tea, it splashes over the carpet, and a light is flicked on, accompanied by a muffled scream.

Yaz is sat bolt upright in bed, clutching a grubby-looking duvet around herself and staring at the Doctor with wide, terrified eyes. The room is in a state of disarray; there’s discarded, dirty clothes spread across the carpet, and unwashed crockery covers the desk, the bedside table, and – apparently – the corner of the floor where the Doctor had found her hands. A pinboard is propped against the wall opposite the bed, its contents facing the paintwork, and the Doctor can see the exhaustion and fear etched onto Yaz’s face as she blinks at her, her hair unkempt and unwashed, and her lower lip chapped and cracked.

“I’m dreaming,” Yaz says quietly, squeezing her eyes tightly shut and shaking her head ferociously, as though doing so might make the Doctor disappear. “This is just a dream, and I’m going to go back to sleep, and you’re still going to be dead.”

“I’m definitely not dead,” the Doctor says in a low, reassuring voice, trying and failing to mop up the spreading puddle of tea with a grey pair of joggers, and feeling a brief flash of panic that she might, perhaps, have missed some kind of memo, and has officially been declared dead. It wouldn’t be the first time. “Last time I checked, anyway.”

“You died,” Yaz says more emphatically, pushing the heels of her hands into her eye sockets and continuing to shake her head, before chancing a panicked glance at the Doctor, seeming all the more disconcerted to find that she was still there, crouched awkwardly on her bedroom floor and endeavouring to clear up after herself. “You died, on Gallifrey.”

“I definitely didn’t.”

“You did. You walked out of the TARDIS, and you… you died.”

“No, I… Ko Sharmus died,” the Doctor feels her hearts ache at the recollection of the stranger and the magnitude of his sacrifice. “He took the Death Particle and the explosives and I… well, I took a ship and found my TARDIS, but then… well, you know how it is with me, things got out of hand. I was stuck somewhere, but I managed to get out – someone helped me get out – and I sort of ended up here without trying to; default mechanism, perhaps. How long have I been gone?”

“Six months.”

“Oh,” the Doctor leans over and turns the pinboard around absentmindedly, as though doing so might alleviate some of Yaz’s trepidation, and she smiles as it reveals blurry, badly out of focus Polaroids of the four of them, beaming with their arms slung around each other in the console room, and more professional-looking photos of Yaz in her police uniform, grinning proudly beside her mum and dad like a child on their first day of school. Something about it being turned away from view tugs at her hearts, demanding her attention, and her stomach drops as she looks around the room at the mess and asks: “Where are Ryan and Graham?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know?” she demands, then cringes at the harshness of her tone as Yaz flinches, drawing the duvet around herself more tightly. The Doctor sighs and shakes her head, trying to quell a rising sense of guilt, before continuing more gently: “Sorry. Sorry. I… where are they?”

“We fell out when we… when we got back. Literally right after we got back… we had some differences of opinion.”

“About?”

“You being dead.”

“Oh,” the Doctor doesn’t dare ask what the opinions were; can’t bring herself to know what her friends thought of her fate. “Is that why the board is turned around?”

“Yeah,” Yaz worries at her lower lip with her fingers, picking at it until it bleeds, and the Doctor resists the parental urge that bubbles up within her to slap Yaz’s hand away from her mouth and chastise her for the action. Looking down at her own clenched fists, she realises the irony of such a gesture, and bites back a sound of bemusement. “Look, are you sure this isn’t a dream? Because if it is, I want my money back. You look like crap, and quite frankly, it’s not up to my usual standards.”

“Thanks,” the Doctor lets out a mirthless laugh, running a hand through her greasy, straggly hair and grimacing. It’s longer than she’d like it, and dirtier than she recalls it seeming in her cell; perhaps she just feels more acutely self-conscious now that someone is looking at her for the first time in months. “Six months in maximum security will do that to you.”

“Six months in…”

“Why turn away the pics of you in your uniform?” the Doctor muses aloud with a frown, keen to avoid the avenue of questioning and instead reaching for one of the photographs, running her fingertips over the corner. She can feel the love imbued within the print; can feel the echoes of pride and laughter that came with the day and the memory captured within. “You love…”

She doesn’t get any further. She doesn’t need to; she looks over at Yaz and sees the guilt and remorse and self-loathing etched on her friend’s face, and she reaches for her then, ignoring how much it hurts when Yaz recoils from her touch as though she’s been burned.

“Oh, Yaz,” she breathes, dropping her arms uselessly to her sides and desperately willing herself not to cry as she bunches her hands into fists. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t… but why? You loved it; you were so proud…”

“Because how…” Yaz says thickly, turning her face away and speaking so softly that the Doctor can barely hear her, the words spoken to the wall rather than to her. “How could I save anyone else when I couldn’t even save you?”

“Oh, Yaz,” the Doctor says again, and she acts without thinking; she moves forwards until she’s perched on the edge of the bed and draws her friend into her arms, holding her tightly and feeling a sense of inexplicable relief and contentment as Yaz relaxes into the embrace, her arms settling around her in reciprocation. This feels right and safe; this is something she’s been yearning for, all those months in her cell, without even realising it. “We can fix this. Alright? We can fix _everything_. I promise.”

“How?” Yaz asks, her face buried in the Doctor’s shoulder, and the Doctor strokes her hair with one gentle, trembling hand, feeling her friend’s tears soaking into the stained fabric of her jacket. “How do we fix everything?”

“I don’t know,” the Doctor admits, then continues in the jauntiest tone she can manage: “I don’t. But I think I could maybe start with having a shower, because Judoon prisons are a whole other level of nasty, and then maybe you could shower and I could attempt a bit of a room clean-up, and then maybe there could be… I don’t know, a phone call to Graham or Ryan?”

“Alright,” Yaz murmurs, stifling a yawn in the Doctor’s coat. “But first… can I maybe… go…” her words are lost in another yawn, and the Doctor remembers abruptly that it’s the middle of the night.

“Right,” the Doctor grimaces, moving to let go of her friend, but Yaz only clings on all the tighter, refusing to yield her hold on her. It’s a strangely nice feeling, to know she is quite so wanted; quite so needed.

“No,” Yaz mumbles, her voice faint and oddly child-like as she clutches stubbornly onto the Doctor and closes her eyes, sleep already threatening to reclaim her. “Stay.”

“I…”

“Stay,” Yaz pleads sleepily. “Please don’t go again.”

“Alright,” the Doctor acquiesces, smiling softly to herself. “Alright, I’ll stay.”

* * *

When Najia sticks her head into her daughter’s room the next morning, carrying out the daily check that has become an essential part of her routine since Yaz had returned from Leeds with a haunted look in her eyes and an utter refusal to disclose a word about her travels, she finds the bed occupied by two instead of one.

Yaz is sound asleep in the arms of the strange, golden-haired woman who had showed up in their flat all those months before and fought the spiders with them. Najia knows she ought to be worried by this; by the fact that this woman has snuck into her home in the dead of night, and yet all she can focus on is her daughter, and the fact that Yaz’s expression is more composed than it’s been in a long time as she lays in the woman’s arms; the hint of a smiling playing over the corner of her daughter’s mouth.

The strangely-garbed not-stranger meets her gaze without embarrassment, without apology, without shyness, and offers her a small nod by way of greeting.

“I’m back now,” she says quietly. “And I’ll look after Yaz. I promise.”

And somehow…

Najia believes her.


End file.
